Refrigerated doughs are increasingly popular with consumers due to ease of preparation. Since the dough is fully prepared, the consumer is left only with the task of baking the dough in order to attain "fresh from the oven" rolls, biscuits, bread and pastries.
Although refrigerated doughs are a great boon to consumers, processing the doughs pose large problems for manufacturers. Processing of refrigerated doughs is unique. Unlike dough processing in bakeries, refrigerated doughs require significantly more processing in the form of sheeting, lapping, and packaging of the dough. Processing lines for refrigerated doughs can extend over one hundred feet. An example of a typical processing/sheeting line for refrigerated dough is outlined in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,593,676 and 3,177,081 which are herein incorporated by reference.
One of the major problems encountered during manufacture of refrigerated dough is that dough temperature may increase to a point where processing is impossible or dough quality decreases. The temperature of refrigerated dough must remain at or below 70 degrees Fahrenheit or thereabout throughout processing to ensure that the leaveners are not spent during processing. The temperature of the dough must remain low to limit the dough from sticking to the rollers during sheeting and to generally ease handling of the dough. Finally, the temperature of the dough must remain low to ensure consistent packing of the dough into cans.
The Pillsbury Company is currently selling refrigerated dough for sweet rolls which contain up to about 7-8% dextrose by weight. An example of a typical refrigerated dough formulation is the following:
______________________________________ Ingredients Percent by weight ______________________________________ Flour 45-55 Shortening 2-6 Water 20-29 Dextrose 2-8 Salt 0.1-2 Leavener 1-4 Flavoring 0-9 ______________________________________
U.S. Pat. No. 3,524,401 describes refrigerated dough mixing and preparation and is herein incorporated by reference. Any type of leavener system suitable for refrigerated doughs may be employed in the composition, these include but are not limited to chemical leaveners. Doughs prepared according to the above formulation remain at or below 70.degree. F. or thereabout without the use of cooling equipment.
Due to the consumers' increasing desire for sweeter foods, dough manufacturers have reformulated their sweet refrigerated doughs such as rolls, pastries, and strudels to yield sweeter products. Consumer preference correlates directly with product sweetness. Consumers prefer a sweeter product than products prepared from doughs according to the typical formulation above. This has sparked an interest to reformulate the dough. Although altering the dough to create a sweeter product may seem relatively simple, unforeseen problems arise during reformulation. Specifically, merely changing the ingredients of the dough unexpectedly raised the temperature of the dough leaving the new formulation unsuitable for processing.
Reformulating doughs to sweeten the end product is achieved by two methods. The amount of sugar present in the dough is increased, and/or a sweeter sugar is substituted for the sugar already present in the dough.
Sugars are ranked according to the sweet taste they impart. To rank sugars, a 10% aqueous solution of the sugar is tasted at room temperature. Sucrose is the reference sugar and is arbitrarily given a value of 100. All other sugars are compared to the sweetness of sucrose and ranked accordingly. Fructose and dextrose are sugars commonly used to sweeten foodstuffs. On the sucrose reference scale, fructose has a sweetness value of 117, and dextrose has a value of 65.
Trials with taste testers determined that a dough containing about 16% sucrose had the desired sweetness for sweet rolls. This dough was significantly sweeter than a similar product prepared with 8% dextrose.
Problems arose when production of the 16% sucrose dough was scaled up for commercial manufacture. In order to add more sugar to the dough, the major components of the dough formulation had to be altered. Specifically, the flour and water composition of the dough also had to be altered along with altering the sugar composition. This was necessary to maintain a constant batch size and also to attempt to achieve the desired rheology of the dough. Thus, by changing the sugar composition, the flour to water ratio in the dough was also changed yielding a dough higher in percent solids. The higher percentage of solids inhibited gluten development and dough formation since less water was present to wet the flour. It was therefore impossible to make a dough containing 16% sucrose because altering the dough formulation to increase the amount of sugar above 12% deleteriously affected gluten development and therefore affected dough rheology.
Generally, dough development describes the phenomenon by which a loose mass of flour particles, when admixed with water, becomes a cohesive resilient body of dough. As the dough is mixed, the gluten protein from the flour forms a resilient, extensible matrix. This matrix is necessary for dough formation. It allows the dough to entrap and retain leavening gas bubbles and is the initial support for the expanding dough structure during baking.
Adding a greater percentage of sugar to the dough obviously changed the flour to water ratio yielding a dough higher in percent solids. The higher percentage of solids inhibited dough formation since less water was present to wet the flour and form a dough.
When it became apparent that a dough containing 16% sucrose was impossible to produce, a dough containing 12% sucrose was tested. It was surprisingly found that even increasing the sucrose to 12% was impossible because an increase to 12% sucrose in the dough unexpectedly raised the dough temperature above 70 degrees Fahrenheit or thereabout. This change in temperature made the dough unsuitable for processing. Therefore, it was impossible to manufacture a refrigerated dough containing even 12% sucrose under current manufacturing practices.
The problem of increased temperature created by changing the sugar composition of the dough can be solved by installing cooling equipment. This equipment may either lower the temperature of the ingredients which are added to the dough or may act to cool the dough once it has been formed. Although adding cooling equipment will solve the problem of creating a sweeter dough and maintaining a low processing temperature, it is prohibitively expensive. For example, equipment to cool ingredients used to prepare refrigerated dough in a facility which produces up to 3 million cases per year would cost around $1 million. The cost of operating such equipment would raise the cost of the dough up to 4%.
Next, a dough composition containing 12% dextrose was tested. Although this did produce a dough with a temperature suitable for refrigerated dough production, a dough containing 12% dextrose did not yield a dough sweet enough for consumer's tastes. It was impossible to produce a dough having the optimum level of sweetness without employing additional cooling equipment before the advent of the present invention.